TY - JOUR

T1 - Conservation publications and their provisions to protect research participants

AU - Ibbett, Harriet

AU - Brittain, Stephanie

N1 - This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Ibbett, H. and Brittain, S., 2019. Conservation publications and their provisions to protect research participants. Conservation Biology. Which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13337. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. © 2019 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology.

PY - 2020/2

Y1 - 2020/2

N2 - Social science methods are increasingly applied in conservation research. However, the conservation sector has received criticism for inadequate ethical rigor when research involves people, particularly when investigating socially sensitive or illegal behaviors. We conducted a systematic review to investigate conservation journals' ethical policies when research involves human participants, and to assess the types of ethical safeguards documented in conservation articles. We restricted our review to articles that used social science methods to gather data from local people about a potentially sensitive behavior: hunting. Searches were conducted in the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for research articles in English published from January 2000 to May 2018. Only studies conducted in countries in south and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America were considered. In total, 4456 titles and 626 abstracts were scanned, with 185 studies published in 57 journals accepted for full review. For each article, any information regarding ethical safeguards implemented to protect human participants was extracted. We identified an upward trend in the documentation of provisions to protect human participants. Overall, 55% of articles documented at least one ethical safeguard. However, often safeguards were poorly described. In total, 37% of journals provided ethics guidelines and required authors to report ethical safeguards in manuscripts, but a significant mismatch between journal policies and publication practice was identified. Nearly, half the articles published in journals that should have included ethics information did not. We encourage authors to rigorously report ethical safeguards in publications and urge journal editors to make ethics statements mandatory, to provide explicit guidelines to authors that outline journal ethical reporting standards, and to ensure compliance throughout the peer-review process.

AB - Social science methods are increasingly applied in conservation research. However, the conservation sector has received criticism for inadequate ethical rigor when research involves people, particularly when investigating socially sensitive or illegal behaviors. We conducted a systematic review to investigate conservation journals' ethical policies when research involves human participants, and to assess the types of ethical safeguards documented in conservation articles. We restricted our review to articles that used social science methods to gather data from local people about a potentially sensitive behavior: hunting. Searches were conducted in the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for research articles in English published from January 2000 to May 2018. Only studies conducted in countries in south and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America were considered. In total, 4456 titles and 626 abstracts were scanned, with 185 studies published in 57 journals accepted for full review. For each article, any information regarding ethical safeguards implemented to protect human participants was extracted. We identified an upward trend in the documentation of provisions to protect human participants. Overall, 55% of articles documented at least one ethical safeguard. However, often safeguards were poorly described. In total, 37% of journals provided ethics guidelines and required authors to report ethical safeguards in manuscripts, but a significant mismatch between journal policies and publication practice was identified. Nearly, half the articles published in journals that should have included ethics information did not. We encourage authors to rigorously report ethical safeguards in publications and urge journal editors to make ethics statements mandatory, to provide explicit guidelines to authors that outline journal ethical reporting standards, and to ensure compliance throughout the peer-review process.

KW - anonimato

KW - anonymity

KW - caceria

KW - ciencias sociales

KW - comites de revision institucional

KW - consentimiento autorizado

KW - entrevistas

KW - etica de la investigacion humana

KW - human research ethics

KW - hunting

KW - informed consent

KW - institutional review boards

KW - interviews

KW - rompimiento de reglas

KW - rule breaking

KW - social science

U2 - 10.1111/cobi.13337

DO - 10.1111/cobi.13337

M3 - Article

C2 - 31016794

VL - 34

SP - 80

EP - 92

JO - Conservation Biology

JF - Conservation Biology

SN - 0888-8892

IS - 1

ER -